As stated previously, nonverbal methods which provide the opportunity to ‘show and tell’ what happened at a specific situation have been found to supplement children’s verbal reports, by helping them communicate information that is unclear or missing from their statements (Pipe & Salmon, 2008). This is supported by the fact that children tend to use accompanying nonverbal behaviour when talking about past
experiences (Stevanoni & Salmon, 2005). Particularly, children use gestures, mime, and bodily movements from a very early developmental stage to express emotions and other representational information, such as attributes of objects and actions (Kelly & Church, 1998; P. J. Miller & Sperry, 1988). Given that young children usually provide brief reports of past experiences (e.g. Hammond & Fivush, 1991), allowing them to demonstrate what happened may facilitative their limited narrative skills (Pipe & Salmon, 2008) and hence enhance their eyewitness accounts.
1.7.1 Research evidence about the use of dramatization in recall. Previous empirical work used the term re-enactment to describe the use of movements and spontaneous expression of emotions by means of gestures and mime (Liwag & Stein, 1995; Risemberg & Zimmerman, 1992). Initial research on re-enactment in relation to children’s memories was produced by Risemberg and Zimmerman (1992). They found that children who re-enacted past experiences through body movements and facial expressions showed better recall than children who were asked to re-enact without a facial expression, or only talk. The authors concluded that the kinetic, cognitive, and affective nature of re-enactment facilitates retrieval, by organizing the various pieces of information relevant to a target event, thus allowing children to provide more detailed reports.
Liwag and Stein (1995) further investigated whether emotional reinstatement facilitated 2- to 6- year old children’s verbal accounts of past emotional experiences, which were provided by their parents. They found that re-enactment helped children provide more detailed and structured reports, compared to the children in the other conditions. The striking finding in this study was that children were not only reinstating the emotion in question, but were physically dramatizing all the actions
that took place in the target event by doing ‘full-blown imitations’ (p. 26), despite the fact they had been instructed to only reinstate an emotion. Liwag and Stein argued that emotion reinstatement cannot take place without body movements and gestures, which are elements of re-enactment and dramatization. They concluded that re-enactment provides children with additional nonverbal cues which help organize their narration and thus facilitates verbal recall (Liwag & Stein, 1995). Although this work looked at re-enactment of past memories from various angles, it mainly involved children’s reinstatement of emotions about personal experiences, based on their parents’ elaborations, and not their own.
Wesson and Salmon (2001) took Liwag and Stein’s work a step further and asked 5- to 9- year old children to recollect a time when they felt happy, sad, or scared and to either tell, draw and tell, or re-enact and tell what happened. They found that the children who drew and re-enacted while talking provided twice as much
information than the children in the tell-only condition. They also found that both drawing and re-enactment elicited similar types of information, specifically information about objects and descriptions, which was significantly more than the verbal interview provided. This finding implies that both these strategies may arise from a common mechanism, or mechanisms, which render them effective. Wesson and Salmon concluded that both drawing and re-enactment may serve as retrieval cues which activate children’s memory of emotionally meaningful autobiographical
experiences. However, no check was made by the experimenters to verify if the information reported by the children was true or fabricated, an issue that raises concerns regarding children’s accuracy of reports.
Salmon and her colleagues (2003) investigated whether drawing and re- enactment of children’ emotional experiences (happiness and fear) enhanced their
verbal accounts, and verified their reports with their parents. Contrary to Wesson and Salmon (2001), they found that drawing elicited a greater amount of retrieval cues than re-enactment. They proposed that drawing is a sound interview strategy when asking children to talk about past experiences because it seems to produce more verbal information than re-enacting or simply talking about an event (Salmon et al., 2003). Nonetheless, as per the previous studies, concerns can be raised regarding the accuracy of children’s reports. It may be that the guardians’ memories of the
children’s experiences were affected by time delays, and there might have been cases in which the parents were not familiar with the reported events (Jolley, 2010).
The aforementioned studies investigated the effectiveness of re-enactment as a retrieval cue in children’s memories of experiences that are emotionally meaningful to them. Previous work has shown that events which evoke strong emotions tend to persist longer in memory than more neutral events (Mickley Steinmetz, Schmidt, Zucker, & Kensinger, 2012). However, there may be instances in which children are required to offer testimony for events they witnessed which may not evoke
particularly strong emotions. This issue was addressed by Stevanoni and Salmon (2005). In a more detailed study on re-enactment, they investigated the effects of different kinds of gestures (i.e. instructed gesture, spontaneous gesture, modeled gesture, and no gesture) on children’s verbal recall of a staged event. They found that children in the gesture-instructed condition reported more than twice the amount of information than the children in a no-gesture condition, thereby producing richer and more thorough reports. They too support previous findings that gesturing while narrating may help children reinstate the experience in their memory, serving as a nonverbal cue which in turn activates other aspects of memory. There is also a
and therefore were motivated to report more information. Stevanoni and Salmon (2005) argued that re-enacting may be a useful tool in children’s forensic interviews, however their event was not forensically related. In their study, each child became a pirate, made a map, found a key, and then located the hidden treasure.
To investigate the effectiveness of re-enactment in children’s recall of an event they passively witnessed, this thesis adopted a more forensically relevant scenario. This will allow us to empirically test whether this method facilitates eyewitness accounts, and further investigate if children’s individual differences in relation to bodily movements can enrich their reports. From an applied perspective, if re-
enactment has a positive effect on children’s recall it could potentially enhance legal officials’ work with young eyewitnesses, as it does not require any props and is easy to use. Taking into account Liwag and Stein’s observation (1995) that the children in their study dramatized whole scenes of the past events, the term ‘dramatization’ is considered more appropriate and will be used within this project to refer to re- enactment of events.
In summary, the nonverbal interview methods outlined in the previous sections have been used in an attempt to supplement children’s verbal reports. Nevertheless, the substantial variability which has been observed within age groups in children’s verbal reports suggests that children’s individual differences may also play an intermediary role in their recall of events (Salmon et al., 2003) and hence deserve further empirical testing. Such internal factors will be explored in the following sections.